FilmBlather.com

"Hey look! I made a bridge! And it only took me what? 10 seconds?"

I support Disney's efforts to move away from their traditional "Broadway musical" formula for making animated features. Though some great films emerged from the Disney showtunes era, the format is tired, and the latest installments have been weak. Last year's The Emperor's New Groove was a huge step forward. Atlantis: The Lost Empire is a step back. Apparently, the animators were looking to place an emphasis on story this time around, and they failed.

The movie earns points for making its protagonist a linguist, of all things. Disney also reportedly hired a real-life linguist to make up a language for the Atlanteans, but more on that later. Michael J. Fox, who, since beginning his fight with Parkinson's disease, has become voice artist extraordinaire, plays Milo, the scientist in question. He has dedicated his career at a museum of natural history to discovering the lost continent of Atlantis. His superiors have rebuked his efforts, dismissing his obsession as a hopeless flight of fancy.

Little did Milo know that his father, also a researcher dedicated to finding Atlantis, discovered an ancient book that explains how to find it. He left this book to an old friend of his, who has already booked a state of the art expedition to the fabled underwater continent, and saved Milo a seat.

So Milo and a motley crew of military officers, pilots, diggers and demolitionists, take off in a bizarre-looking submarine to look for Atlantis. As the advertising not-so-subtly suggests, they find it, and find also that its ancient society has survived to this day. But Milo's companions aren't interested in studying these people; they want to steal the Heart of Atlantis, the industrial-sized diamond that is the continent's life force, and leave the inhabitants to die.

Disney has ditched most of the extraneous elements here; there are no funny sidekicks, no cute animals, no musical numbers. It's all about story, folks. The problem is that the story is weak, possibly even more so than "ordinary" Disney features. The movie puts in some strictly surface-level mythology to justify the bizarre supernatural proceedings (the film has been compared with Japanese anime, but even the weakest entry in that genre has more guts than Atlantis) and then bases its climax on the entirely illogical presumption that the gang of profiteers would take the trouble to destroy the continent before leaving with the loot.

You can't have it both ways. A Disney movie must either have the distractions that the filmmakers tried so hard to purge or it must have a solid storyline that stands on its own merits. If anything, Atlantis won't be notable in 10 years as a new Disney rennaissance a lá The Little Mermaid, but as the last stand of tranditional cel animation against the newfangled CGI that seems to be taking over the genre. And while the graphics here are impressive, they amount to little compared to the likes of Shrek.

With The Emperor's New Groove, the Mouse House proved that it can still tell a good story and make a terrifically entertaining production. Atlantis proves that if you want to tell a story, you need a story.